What Barbara Kingsolver says about seasons echoes how I feel about them, having grown up in the LA area.\u00c2\u00a0 I still find it so amazing that all the trees burst into bloom at the same time!\u00c2\u00a0 I was so delighted to read that someone else feels the same way, I’m going to copy the passage here:<\/p>\n
“January brings the snow . . . ,” began the well-thumbed, illustrated children’s book about the seasons that my children cleaved to as gospel, while growing up in a place where January did nothing of the kind….<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, in every winter of the world, Arizona schoolchildren fold and snip paper snowflakes to tape around the blackboard.\u00c2\u00a0 In October they cut out orange paper leaves, and tulips in spring, just as colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to the continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored.\u00c2\u00a0 The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.<\/p>\n
Now, at our farm, when the fully predicted snow fell from the sky, or the leaves changed, or tulips popped out of the ground, we felt a shock of thrill.\u00c2\u00a0 For the kids it seemed like living in storybook land; for Steven and me it was a more normal return to childhood, the old days, the way things ought to be.\u00c2\u00a0 If we remembered the snow being deeper, the walks to school harder and longer, we refrained from mentioning that to any young person.\u00c2\u00a0 But the seasons held me in thrall.<\/p>\n
— Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, <\/em>p. 296-297<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What Barbara Kingsolver says about seasons echoes how I feel about them, having grown up in the LA area.\u00c2\u00a0 I still find it so amazing that all the trees burst into bloom at the same time!\u00c2\u00a0 I was so delighted to read that someone else feels the same way, I’m going to copy the passage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderjourneys\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}